I don’t know how many of you watch the Discovery Health channel, but there is a show called Dr. G. She’s the medical examiner for Orange County. And she’s been on tv for several seasons. She is the only medical examiner with her own television show, which is incredibly frightening. I mean, she’s someone who tries to find out how people died and she’s got enough incidents to have her own show.

Some of her cases have non-violent answers. There’s an instance of a man who let an infection fester to the point where he died. Bt the great majority of them seem to be homicides and that’s the scariest part. Like I expect this sort of thing in San Francisco or New York. There are a lot of people there and there’s a lot of violence. But maybe those deaths are all easily solved. A shooting’s a shooting, right? But seeing a television show that has so many mysterious deaths thirty minutes from where you live, well, that’s kind of frightening.

Are there really that many murders?

When I mentioned this to people who’ve lived all their lives in Orlando, they were like, Duh. Florida has one of the highest murder rates in the nation. Ok, seriously. Nobody told me this before I moved here. How could the happiest place on earth be so violent? Well, it turns out most of those murders happen in Miami, which is 8 hours away from here by car.

Still, maybe Dr. G is just a good story-teller and she has good producers. But you know what? She really has a lot of varied ways people can die. And it’s good research for a mystery novel. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I watch the show.